Threat Management, Threat Management
FBI: Online romance scam losses exceed $130M in 2021
The FBI has reported that Americans have lost nearly $133,400,000 from online romance scams during the first seven months of 2021, according to BleepingComputer."The FBI warns of a rising trend in which scammers are defrauding victims via online romance scams, persuading individuals to send money to allegedly invest or trade cryptocurrency," said the FBI in a public service announcement on its Internet Crime Complaint Center site.Individuals could protect themselves from romance scams by avoiding sending cash, trading or investing based on advice of people met online; refraining financial status disclosures to unknown and untrusted people; and ensuring that their Social Security number, banking data and other sensitive data are not shared to anyone online or to websites with questionable legitimacy, said the FBI. More than $1 billion have been lost to romance scams between 2019 and 2020, according to reports from the FBI's IC3. The Department of Justice has also provided a list of hundreds of cases involving fraudsters operating massive romance scams.
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